The Challenge of Liberal Legitimacy

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-91
Author(s):  
Gina Schouten
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Gender Norm ◽  
Gender Egalitarianism ◽  
Gendered Division Of Labor ◽  
The Way

There are a few “easy fixes” or “work-arounds” that may appear to dispel the tension between the gender-egalitarian political agenda and a commitment to politically liberal legitimacy. First, we might argue that those who oppose gender egalitarianism are unreasonable, and thus fall outside the justificatory community that liberalism is committed to respecting. Second, we might argue that gender-norm-compliant choices are non-voluntary, and so need not be respected within liberal political institutions. Finally, we might argue that the gendered division of labor violates basic liberties, and so can be politically remediated on those grounds, even if the means of remediation are controversial. This chapter addresses each possibility and shows why they are not promising fixes. The main goals are to show that the problem is genuine and cannot be easily dispelled by some tempting quick fixes, and in so doing to clear the way for consideration of more promising solutions.

The Mal-Distribution Strategy

2019 ◽  
pp. 92-113
Author(s):  
Gina Schouten
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Distribution Strategy ◽  
Relative Value ◽  
Gendered Division Of Labor ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Way

This chapter critiques the prevailing strategy for defending gender-egalitarian political interventions as legitimate exercises of political power compliant with the neutrality constraint. According to this strategy, the gendered division of labor constitutes or causes unjust distributions of goods, and gender-egalitarian interventions can be legitimate means to remedy those unjust distributions. This strategy is appealing because of its apparent promise of justifying gender-egalitarian policies without making any judgments as to the relative value of gender-egalitarian and gender-inegalitarian lifestyles. I argue that, despite its appeal, this strategy is inadequate. First, the distributional strategy is not compliant with the neutrality constraint in the way that its proponents have claimed; second, independently of liberal legitimacy, the injustice of the gendered division of labor is not best diagnosed as distributional.

Heimlich/unheimlich

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 366-387
Author(s):  
João de Castro Maia Veiga Figueiredo
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Gendered Division Of Labor ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
The Way

The Catholic missions of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit have had a strong bearing on the development of Angolan Christianity, especially from the 1890’s onwards. This period coincided with the introduction of photography to the colony. While it has been established that individual Spiritans collaborated with pioneer photographers, the Congregation’s influence on the content of early Angolan “photographic archives” is still largely unconsidered. This study will trace the missionaries’ influence in the work of José Augusto Cunha Moraes (1855–1933) and Elmano Cunha e Costa (1892–1955). Particular attention will be paid to the way these photographers echoed the missionaries’ worldview by portraying their missions as ‘cozy’ places and naturalizing a specific, gendered division of labor.

The Evolution of Gender

2019 ◽  
pp. 84-102
Author(s):  
Cailin O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Common Ancestor ◽  
Recent Common Ancestor ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Most Recent Common Ancestor ◽  
Gendered Division Of Labor ◽  
The Way

This chapter does two things. The first is to use the evolutionary framework developed to explain a particular feature of the gendered division of labor—that some aspects of it seem conventional, and other less so. In developing this argument, the chapter employs a novel measure intended to capture the way conventionality can vary in degrees. The second is to explain why, somewhere between our most recent common ancestor and now, gender emerged in human groups. Some social scientists have argued not just that gender facilitates division of labor, but that gender itself exists in order to divide labor. The chapter presents a how-possibly model for the emergence of gender in a society without it.

A Stalled Revolution and the Gender-Egalitarian Policy Agenda

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-62
Author(s):  
Gina Schouten
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
Policy Agenda ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Mutual Respect ◽  
Gender Egalitarianism ◽  
Gendered Division Of Labor ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter reviews the empirical literature on the gendered division of labor, demonstrating that paid work and unpaid caregiving labor remain unequally distributed according to gender and that political interventions can be effective in inducing families to share work more equally. The main goal in this review of the empirical literature is to motivate the project. I then set out the menu of gender-egalitarian interventions that would be, if implemented, promising strategies for eroding the gendered division of labor. Finally, I explore political liberalism’s commitment to mutual respect, working to get more precise about what the gender-egalitarian interventions in question do, why they are appropriately regarded as subsidies for gender-egalitarian lifestyles, and why subsidizing gender egalitarianism seems, intuitively, to be at odds with mutual respect. The goal here is to build a rough understanding of the reciprocity considerations embedded in the ideal of mutual respect.

Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gina Schouten
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Liberal Society ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Gender Egalitarianism ◽  
Gendered Division Of Labor ◽  
Public Resources ◽  
Paid Labor ◽  
Political Intervention

The trend toward gender equalization in domestic and paid labor allocations has stalled, and a growing number of scholars argue that, absent political intervention, further eroding of the gendered division of labor will not be forthcoming anytime soon. Certain political interventions could jumpstart the stalled gender revolution, but beyond their prospects for effectiveness, such interventions stand in need of another kind of justification. In a diverse, liberal state, reasonable citizens will disagree about what makes for a good life and a good society. Because a fundamental commitment of liberalism is to limit political intrusion into the lives of citizens and allow considerable space for those citizens to act on their own conceptions of the good, questions of legitimacy arise. Legitimacy concerns the constraints we must abide by as we seek collective political solutions to our shared social problems, given that we will disagree, reasonably, both about what constitutes a problem and about what costs we should be willing to incur to fix it. The interventions in question would subsidize gender-egalitarian lifestyles at a cost to those who prefer to maintain a traditional gendered division of labor. In a pluralistic, liberal society where many citizens reasonably resist the feminist agenda, can scarce public resources be used to finance political interventions to subsidize gender egalitarianism? This book argues that they can, and moreover, that they can even by the lights of political liberalism, a particularly demanding theory of liberal legitimacy.

The Southern Slope of Monsalvat: How Spanish Wagnerism Became Catalan

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Clinton D. Young
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Slope ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Symphonic Culture ◽  
Similar Dynamic ◽  
The Way

This article examines the development of Wagnerism in late-nineteenth-century Spain, focusing on how it became an integral part of Catalan nationalism. The reception of Wagner's music and ideas in Spain was determined by the country's uneven economic development and the weakness of its musical and political institutions—the same weaknesses that were responsible for the rise of Catalan nationalism. Lack of a symphonic culture in Spain meant that audiences were not prepared to comprehend Wagner's complexity, but that same complexity made Wagner's ideas acceptable to Spanish reformers who saw in the composer an exemplar of the European ideas needed to fix Spanish problems. Thus, when Wagner's operas were first staged in Spain, the Teatro Real de Madrid stressed Wagner's continuity with operas of the past; however, critics and audiences engaged with the works as difficult forms of modern music. The rejection of Wagner in the Spanish capital cleared the way for his ideas to be adopted in Catalonia. A similar dynamic occurred as Spanish composers tried to meld Wagner into their attempts to build a nationalist school of opera composition. The failure of Tomás Bréton's Los amantes de Teruel and Garín cleared the way for Felip Pedrell's more successful theoretical fusion of Wagnerism and nationalism. While Pedrell's opera Els Pirineus was a failure, his explanation of how Wagner's ideals and nationalism could be fused in the treatise Por nuestra música cemented the link between Catalan culture and Wagnerism.

Social Norms, Choice, and Work

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie Hartley
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Work And Family ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Gendered Division Of Labor

In modern liberal democracies, the gendered division of labor is partially the result of men and women making different choices about work and family life, even if such choices stem from social norms about gender. The choices that women make relative to men’s disadvantage them in various ways: such choices lead them to earn less, enjoy less power and prestige in the labor market, be less able to participate in the political sphere on an equal basis, make them to some degree financially dependent on others, and leave them at a bargaining disadvantage and vulnerable in certain personal relationships. This chapter considers if and when the state should intervene to address women’s disadvantage and inequalities that are the result of gender specialization. It is argued that political liberals can and sometimes must intervene in the gendered division of labor when persons’ interests as free and equal citizens are frustrated.

The Social and Institutional Bases of Distributive Justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Distributive Justice ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Cooperation ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Political Cooperation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
Trade And Exchange ◽  
Cooperative Institutions

This chapter argues that distributive justice is institutionally based. Certain cooperative institutions are basic: they are necessary for economic production and the division of labor, trade and exchange, and distribution and consumption. These background institutions presuppose principles of justice to specify their terms, allocate productive resources, and define fair distributions. Primary among these basic institutions are property; laws and conventions enabling transfers of goods and productive resources; and the legal system of contract and agreements that make transfers possible and productive. Political institutions are necessary to specify, interpret, enforce, and make effective the terms of these institutions. Thus, basic cooperative institutions are social; they are realizable only within the context of social and political cooperation—this is a fixed empirical fact about cooperation among free and equal persons. Given the nature of fair social cooperation as a kind of reciprocity, distributive justice is primarily social rather than global in reach.

Mobilized Yet Contained: Popular Women, Feminisms, and Organizing around Venezuela’s 2012 Organic Labor Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 0094582X2110130
Author(s):  
Rachel Elfenbein
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Gendered Division Of Labor ◽  
Women's Organizing ◽  
State Adoption ◽  
Las Mujeres ◽  
The Revolution

Venezuela’s state-led national-popular Bolivarian process opened up a new political field for feminism—an approach that was both institutional and popular, aiming to combine forces from above and from below and use state gender institutions to foment popular women’s organization. Yet this field was conflictual, containing contesting popular feminist projects with different implications for the gendered division of labor. Analysis of popular women’s organizing around Venezuela’s 2012 organic labor law shows that state adoption of feminism marked a gendered political opening for popularizing feminism while also presenting risks of state co-optation of popular women’s organizing. The state understood popular women’s organization and mobilization as central to the revolution, yet it generally attempted to limit their autonomy and organizing to challenge the gendered division of labor. El bolivarianismo nacional-popular liderado por el estado venezolano abrió un nuevo campo político para el feminismo: un enfoque que era tanto institucional como popular y cuyo objetivo era combinar fuerzas tanto de arriba como de abajo, así como utilizar las instituciones estatales de género para fomentar las organizaciones populares de mujeres. Sin embargo, este campo resultó conflictivo, y parte de su contenido impugnaba proyectos feministas populares con diferentes implicaciones para las divisiones de género en el trabajo. El análisis de la organización popular de las mujeres en torno a la ley orgánica del trabajo de Venezuela de 2012 muestra que la adopción estatal del feminismo marcó una apertura política de género con intenciones de popularizar el feminismo a la vez que presentaba el riesgo de que la organización popular de las mujeres fuera cooptada por el estado. El estado consideraba la organización y movilización popular de las mujeres como esenciales a la revolución. Sin embargo y hablando generalmente, se abocó a limitar su autonomía y organización cuando se trataba de desafiar las divisiones de género en el trabajo.

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